


Hearts of the Winter

by sommarpatriot



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, M/M, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sexual Content, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-16 01:35:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18681457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sommarpatriot/pseuds/sommarpatriot
Summary: This Roadrunner game they play is the closest Steve’s come to feeling alive since before he died, before Howard fished him out of the ocean and brought him back to life, and Steve knows the poetry in all things enough to know that it’s only right that, if he can die, he needs to die by the Winter Soldier’s hand.So he watches that hand move closer across the plane at a breakneck run, and lets the snow bury him before he can take another shot.





	Hearts of the Winter

**Author's Note:**

> There are no accurate or widely believed facts in this fic.

In the dead of a restless night, Steve dreams about a place like this. There’s nothing here, only ice, snow, dirt, and the smell of piss he leaves in a hole because he doesn’t have a pot to do it in. The years have dragged on and brought him here, and now he’s so close. 

He can’t see anything. That’s the problem. That’s not the only problem he has, but it’s the one that matters most. Howard’s tech has been keeping him alive since WWII, and if it weren’t for the bamboo-laced thermal stealth suit he’s wearing he’d have frozen to death hours before, but no one has invented binoculars that can see ghosts. The smell of gun oil lingers on his fingers and it’s all he can smell out here in the nothing, in the canyon between a mountain range and a cliff face. A hint of metal flashes in the distance and that’s all he gets before he takes the shot. 

He’s never been an expert marksman. That gig fell to Bucky, earning him medal after medal for the kinds of shit they did that kept them up at night during the war, making it harder to keep watch, easier to be jumpy, easier to think about the lives they could’ve had if Bucky hadn’t been drafted and Steve hadn’t been so stupid as to _want_ to join the Army. He thinks about that as the wind rages around him and his breath fogs up before it even leaves his lungs. He has regrets, now, but back then it was all he wanted - to serve his country. To fight, with Bucky, and win. Forty years later, he’s still trying to decide if he’s won.

He ducks his head as the bullets fly past and hit the cliff face behind him. They’ve been chasing each other, this man and he, for what is now decades, and every time Steve gets close enough to think he might actually get the better of the Winter Soldier, something like this happens. The crack of gunfire brings the snow down, and Steve has time, of course, to get the hell out of there, and maybe even time to survive, but he doesn’t, because he doesn’t want to. This Roadrunner game they play is the closest Steve’s come to feeling alive since before he died, before Howard fished him out of the ocean and brought him back to life, and Steve knows the poetry in all things enough to know that it’s only right that, if he can die, he needs to die by the Winter Soldier’s hand. 

So he watches that hand move closer across the plane at a breakneck run, and lets the snow bury him before he can take another shot.

~

The first winter without Bucky is less cold than Steve is used to being because he spends it in Howard’s cabin in Calgary with a fire in front of him and three blankets on his king-sized bed, not in a tent on the ground, sleeping back to back with his Commandos for warmth. He sleeps for a week, and then he doesn’t sleep for a week. He plays Howard’s LPs, which are nothing like the gospel Bucky used to play on a Sunday morning before going to church, on a record player Howard made when he was a kid. He cooks himself meals that are nothing like what he and Bucky ate before the war happened, and nothing like what they ate when the war did happen. He reads all the French books in Howard’s library, the ones he’d never been able to get his hands on back in Brooklyn. He talks to Peggy often, but she’s busy. She’s moved on from the war and is re-finding her place in the SSR. Steve is a distraction from that, so he keeps his distance. He catches wild salmon in a stream that runs through the property and eats it alone. He starts drawing again, and then he stops.

He plays poker with Howard’s buddies and whichever girls they bring from the city to brighten up their night. He will talk about something from his old life and whoever he’s with will say, “Are you okay, Captain?” as if they’re talking to a child, so he stops that, too. It’s a long winter in which nothing much happens, and then it’s over.

~

He’s woken up with broken ribs so many times in his life - from getting the shit kicked out of him, getting shot, and once from a lung infection that coupled with his asthma sent him into a coughing fit so bad a couple of them just snapped - that it takes him a minute to remember where exactly he was when he broke his ribs this time. The snow, right. He sits upright, cot springs squeaking with the movement. It’s a small room, a cabin, and he can’t see anything through the windows. His shield is under the bed. The man isn’t looking at him. He’s standing in front of the fire with his back to Steve.

“You didn’t kill me,” Steve says. He’s been taken prisoner since the war, of course, but he’s always gotten out of it. This time, though, he’s not even tied up, and there’s a very slim chance he’ll live to paint this portrait. His ribs were probably broken from the snow falling on him, not from the Winter Soldier’s hands. If he had hurt Steve, Steve would be dead. Steve should be dead right now. “Why not?”

Even his stance screams this is a man Steve should be afraid of, but he isn’t. He’s too tired to be afraid. Afraid was five decades ago when his mom was getting sicker by the day and there was nothing he could do. Afraid was watching Bucky fall into a ravine and knowing he wasn’t coming back this time. Afraid isn’t in his vocabulary these days. 

This is the second time they’ve been this close to each other. The first time Steve limped away with a punctured lung and a shattered collarbone that healed in three days. The redhead isn’t with him this time, and Steve knows he wouldn’t be alive if she was.

“There are stories about you,” the Winter Soldier says, in a voice rusty with misuse. It ripples goosebumps across Steve’s arms. It sounds like home, his real home. It brings back memories of trying to grow geraniums on his and Bucky’s apartment window sill in the summer, and shoving every crack in the floor with cotton balls in the winter. Steve stands. “They say you won the last World War. You and your - friends. I’ve seen your face in newspapers.”

The more he talks, the more his voice sounds achingly familiar and the less the storm seems to rage. The noise of everything dies down until all Steve can hear is Bucky’s voice. 

“You shaped the century. You’re a living legend.”

“If you’ve seen my face, then you would’ve seen yours.” Somehow, they’re a foot apart even though Steve didn’t plan on moving. It’s always been this way: they gravitate toward each other. Does the moon push and the ocean pull? 

As soon as Steve’s hand makes contact with Bucky’s shoulder, it’s ripped away, twisted, bent and pressed into the floor shoulder first. Steve saw the inevitability of that. They were always going to be here.

“Bucky,” he says. The wood floor is hard against his cheek, Bucky’s hand hard as it grips his wrist. His ribs cry out in pain, as does his arm.

“I’m not Bucky. Bucky is dead.” He lets go and steps back, falling into the shadows the fire creates.

Steve stands back up, shaking out his arm to regain feeling. He can’t quite make out Bucky’s features, and the ache is still there. He might be crying. It’s hard to tell. “Who are you then?”

It takes Bucky a long time to answer. While he thinks of a response, Steve sits back down on the bed. The distance between them spans decades of wars and memories, and this seems about the closest he can get. If he can’t have Bucky back, this will need to be the next best thing.

His answer breaks Steve’s heart in a new way. “The asset.”

“Buck…” It slips out. “What did they do to you?”

Bucky shifts enough that the light falls on his face, illuminating the bruises, lines, crow’s feet, scars. His eyes are wet and full of sorrow, the last few decades shining through them. Even now he’s the most beautiful person Steve’s ever seen. Steve wants to kill every motherfucker who ever laid a hand on him.

“I don’t remember.”

~

“I know you don’t want to talk about it,” Peggy starts, only for Howard to interrupt.

“Hey, believe it or not, sometimes talking is the best medicine. And that’s coming from a guy like me.”

Steve rolls his eyes. It’s starting to feel like an intervention. He goes back to staring out the window of Peggy’s new office, which still isn’t painted and probably never will be at this rate. She moved in six months ago and hasn’t bothered to make it comfortable. Even the chair he sits on is basic, wooden. She could upgrade at any time, but she won’t.

Peggy, being the exact opposite of Steve, is not the sentimental type, and it would never have worked between them, anyway, because Steve still isn’t over the war and everything it took from him. 

“It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it,” Steve says. The words are bottled up inside, just waiting to burst forth into the world and relieve the pressure on his shoulders from keeping them in. “It’s that I don’t know where to start.”

“Just say whatever’s on your mind,” Howard says, in a way that makes it clear he would have been extremely uncomfortable if Steve did exactly that.

Peggy reaches out to take his hand. “Whenever you’re ready, we’re here.”

Steve smiles and closes her hand in his own.

~

Bucky stares at him, and keeps staring until Steve feels like he might cry, in a snowstorm, while his best friend, who is now a Soviet assassin, plots his murder. He’s read books about this kind of thing, and the way his life was going from the moment he joined the army, he should’ve known it would lead here eventually. Or, more like the moment Bucky got drafted. It sealed their fates in more ways than one.

“Do you remember the day you got drafted?”

Bucky keeps staring. “I told you, I’m not him. Your friend is dead.”

“Who are you, then?” Steve has to know everything. He’s spent the last forty years chasing the ghost of a myth of a legend, and now he’s here, and now he’s Bucky. How did Bucky get to be like this? What exactly is he? He has to know like he has to breathe.

“Are you the one with amnesia?”

“You just said you were an asset. You didn’t answer my question.”

“You were much better company when you were unconscious.”

Steve closes his eyes. You’re much better company when you’re asleep. His ribs ache and his head aches and his heart aches, three distinct pains that carry the weight of the thousand stupid choices he’s made in his life. He would, he thinks, take it all back if it meant Bucky didn’t fall, but then it was never his choice, and he was only following the best thing he knew to do: go after Bucky. He’s always going after Bucky.

“Who’s the dame that comes on your missions?”

Bucky shrugs, still keeping eye contact, and Steve shifts on the bed. They’re trapped here at the moment, and even if Bucky’s not going to kill him right now, he won’t want to let Steve out of his sight either.

“I only know her as the Widow. She’s useful. Has no problems with breaking a man’s neck, even mine.”

“What does she call you?”

Another long pause, not like he’s thinking, but like he’s biding his time. “Soldier.”

Steve stands, ignoring the shooting pains throughout his body, and moves closer to the fire. It feels as though the only thing holding him together is his stealth suit, as though without it he would fall apart like a burst water balloon. Bucky keeps watching him. He wants to reach out and touch him again. They would sleep together in the winter, back in their apartment, and then on the front lines, and none of the Commandos said anything because it didn’t matter what happened out there as long as they were together. Steve wants to touch him so badly he might combust with the force of it. If he doesn’t, what’s to stop Bucky from disappearing again?

“I miss you, Buck,” Steve says, mostly into the fire. Bucky looks away.

~

Steve’s apartment doesn’t show his sentimental side because he’s hidden all his belongings, including the letters Bucky wrote him from basic, in a safe under the floorboards. He doesn’t trust SHIELD further than he can throw Colonel Stoner, and that has partly to do with his distrust of government organisations and partly to do with the fact that he doesn’t know who he’s fighting against. Communism, apparently, as if he and Dum Dum don’t joke about that behind Stoner’s back. Marx was onto something, but it’s not like intelligence organisations have enough intelligence to not fear a revolution. They just want to keep the people in control in control.

He doesn’t know how to be anything but a soldier. He gets sent on mission after mission because he asked for it, because nothing makes sense without clear and purposeful direction. If he doesn’t have it, he’s just spinning his wheels. Sometimes the Commandos come with him, but soon enough all of them find purpose outside of a warzone. He doesn’t age like they do. It’s not until he’s 53 that he spots his first wrinkle. His body heals from the torture he and other people put it through. He’s a living canvas ready to be wiped clean. He’s not the poster boy; he’s the poster. He gets to see Peggy when he’s in the office, and it’s as good a reason as any to stay.

He thinks of each mission as his last, but he’s been going on last missions since 1943 and nothing’s taken him out of action yet. At least, not permanently.

“Should you slow down, pal?” Howard asks him, but the weapons array he’s brought Steve to says he wants exactly the opposite. If Captain America isn’t toting his guns then the public are going to wonder if Stark and Cap have gone frosty. Trouble in paradise between America’s favourite son and the father of the technological age? Howard may not have invented capitalism but he sure does make it work for his benefit. 

“I’m just getting started,” Steve says. He paints on a smile for the cameras and ignores the looks Howard keeps shooting him for the rest of the day.

~

“How’d you get a fire going?”

Bucky looks at him. “You think I don’t know how to start a fire?”

“I think you know how to put ‘em out.”

Now that he knows Bucky won’t disappear at any second, Steve’s been lying on the cot, resting his ribs. Bucky has been standing watch at the window for two hours, even though the weather hasn’t died down and the reports on the wireless say it won’t for another two days, if Steve’s poor Russian is anything to go by. 

“Supplies in the bunker.”

“Right.” Steve’s responder either dropped out of his suit or Bucky disposed of it because he doesn’t have it, and even if he did, what would he do? Call it in, have SHIELD come and collect them only for Bucky to rip them all to pieces? They lied to him. They kept this information from him. He was right not to trust them, and the longer he lies there the more the plan in his mind grows hold. “Why haven’t you killed me?”

“Because I don’t want to spend the next three days talking to a corpse.”

“You could bury me outside.”

“You giving me ideas, soldier?”

“It’s Captain, now,” Steve says, and as he does he realises how familiarly they slipped back into banter. Bucky’s not gone - not all of him. The fragments of him that make him who he is are still there, even if they’re buried beneath whatever trauma has turned him into a shadow. He’s still savable. 

“So,” Steve says, in a tone he immediately regrets but can’t stop using, “what do you want to spend the next three days doing?”

~

Fury seems like a good guy. He worked his way to the top in a field dominated by old white men with half his knowledge and brilliance, and being there suits him. Fury is unsurprisingly good at getting the job done, even if his managerial skills need work. He handles his spies well, which is how he ends up with the best of them, including a man with sandy blonde hair and light blues eyes who could’ve been a dead ringer for Steve, once.

They offered the job to Steve, who naturally turned it down. He’s no spy, nor is he a manager. The sense of himself he carries around like a sketch in one of his class notebooks fades more each day. He doesn’t know who he is, and it’s dangerous, because soon he won’t know just what it will take to come back to himself.

~

Bucky looks at him again, with surprise this time. “What do I -”

“Want to -” Steve pauses. “When was the last time you did something you wanted to do?” When was the last time you knew how to want something?

Bucky’s gaze is a heavy weight to hold. “You’re still alive, aren’t you?”

~

Every time there’s a security breach Steve has to move apartments. One time a kid tailed him for two days after Steve was too friendly, and then a gang of them turned up outside his apartment building. He was packed within an hour and ready to go that night. The next apartment he moved into was just as beige and non-descript as the last, and on, and on, and on.

What he brings with him each time diminishes with every move and can now be packed into a Gremlin. He leaves most of it in the boxes. It’s easier that way. The furniture comes with the place, and he gets assigned a new car each time until he buys a chopper and refuses to let them update it. 

There has to be some perks to the job, after all.

~

The knife makes dents in the table perfectly spaced between Bucky’s spread fingers at lightning speed that makes Steve dizzy. Or maybe it’s Bucky that’s making him dizzy. They’re so close that Steve can smell the days-old sweat caked on him and see where the frost has bitten his cheeks and lips. He died in the winter. He came back in the winter. It doesn’t so much suit him as it’s part of him.

He finishes with a flourish of his knife which he slips back into its holster. It might have been a threat or a display of his prowess but all Steve can think is that it’s too hard to have Bucky so close when he’s not here at all. He’s not threatened; he’s heartbroken.

“Very cool,” Steve says, around a lump in his throat. 

The Winter Soldier sits back in his chair, straight-backed, his expression hardened. “I have to kill you, Captain.”

“Steve.”

“Steve.”

As soon as he says it Steve wishes he hadn’t. To hear his name in Bucky’s voice after all these years, to see the way Bucky’s lips move as it escapes them, and to know it’s not really Bucky saying it is devastating. Maybe he died when the snow fell on him, and this is hell. Maybe this is his punishment for letting Bucky fall. 

“Buck. You don’t know how hard it’s been - without you.”

Bucky says nothing. The wind rages. The fire crackles. Life goes on.

~

Peggy is red is a sight sweeter than anything Steve’s ever seen. She’s a knockout in her heels and a slip of a dress, something too scandalous for when they met but holds up well in the 70s. She takes his arm as they exit the car and climb the stairs to the palace. They stay close to one another, touch when it’s appropriate, kiss to distract the armed guard who catches them sneaking through the halls, Peggy saying, “Darling, we’ll give this poor man a heart attack,” and Steve imagines this is what their life together would have been like. Sweet. Rich. Full of laughter.

After they take the guard down and it’s back to business, stealing secrets and executing the downfall of regimes.

~

“I told you. I’m not him. Whoever you think I am, you’re wrong.”

Steve knows that. He knows that the same way he knows he’s changed in the intervening years since he lost Bucky - fundamentally, critically. But…

“Do you remember me? At all?”

Bucky takes his knife from the holster again and flips it in his fingers. “No. Only what I’ve read, or what they’ve told me.”

“Have you been Hydra’s soldier this whole time?”

“I don’t know. Do you know who you work for?”

Steve looks down at his own hands. For all the things he’s done in his lifetime, they seem so useless in the face of this situation. He can’t punch Bucky’s memories back into him. He couldn’t even take down Hydra with them.

He glances over to the fire, ideas sparking in his mind. “Any food around here?”

~

The photos featured on Peggy’s mantle change over the years, and Steve supposes the subjects in them do, too. Her house is clean, expensive, populated with oak furniture and rich, warm light.

“You have terrific taste,” Howard says, around a cigar. “I’ve always said if you get out of the spy business and into the interior decorating business you’d make a killing.”

“Yes,” Peggy says, swilling an olive around her martini glass. “You have always said that.”

“Surely, the spy business is rewarding enough,” Maria says to Peggy. She’s a little tipsy, as is Howard, while Peggy has been holding back. Not that Steve’s been counting. He swirls his glass of cognac that Howard poured him rather than drink it out of politeness. 

“Quite,” Peggy agrees. “SHIELD would fall apart without me, anyway, and then where would the future of intelligence be?”

“In shambles, obviously.” Maria and Peggy clink their glasses together across the table. “It’s women’s work, after all.”

Steve stares long enough at the picture of the Howling Commandos to the left of the ikebana arrangement that Peggy catches him. She gives him a look that he only interprets later when Maria and Howard have flown back to Miami when she puts a picture in front of him that he’s never seen before.

“I found it last week when I was cleaning out my my old journals. I don’t know how I misplaced it all these years.”

It’s Bucky lazing against a tree, his shoes off, his shirt unbuttoned, a wrapper in his hand, and smiling with his head tilted back to catch the sun. Steve wipes away the tear that falls onto the photograph.

“I remember this summer.” They were short on chocolate and Bucky complained the whole time until Belgium sent them a shipment as a show of good faith. At least there’s one perk to being a friend of Captain America, Bucky said, picking at his second bar of the day. He worked his way through his rations for weeks until he was down to his last row, which he kept in his top pocket for eight days and eventually gave to an orphan they found hiding in a tree in Anzio, because he had a softer spot for kids than he did for sweets. If Steve wasn’t already in love with him - and it was hard to tell some days, when his entire life he’d lived in a bubble that coloured Bucky rose-red - that would have painted the last stroke on the canvas. 

“He was happy. You all were, that day. You’d just taken down a platoon near Monte Cassino and freed 40 men. You deserved some rest.”

Steve smiles at her. “Did we ever get it?”

Her gaze turns soft, as it usually does when directed at him. “You tell me, Steve.”

~

He finds a frying pan in the fire, some coconut oil to cook with, and something to eat on and with, then gets to work making the best meal he can out of the tins of boiled potatoes and mystery meat dish in the Russian MREs that Bucky fishes out of the bunker. He pours six of the tins together into the frying pan, and Bucky watches him curiously. They’re both big guys. They need a lot of calories.

“How hungry are you?”

Bucky sniffs the air, seemingly on instinct. “They feed me when I come out, and when I come back. I don’t require food.”

Steve hears his own mother’s words come out of his mouth. It’s a distraction from how casually Bucky alludes to the horror he goes through. “I didn’t ask if you required food. I asked how hungry you are.” 

“I’ve never noticed.”

“Okay then, we’ll split it even.”

The food doesn’t take long to heat up, and it tastes surprisingly good. Steve’s always eaten quickly because he never could shake the fear that he wouldn’t be able to finish a meal, and Bucky eats as though he doesn’t care what it tastes like - methodically, like a machine.

“How do you find this eating thing?” Steve asks, around a mouthful. 

Bucky scowls and curls around his bowl. “I’ve done it before.” He shovels a few more mouthfuls in. “But it’s good. Better than American MREs.”

Steve’s heartbeat picks up. “You remember that?”

“That’s what they gave me during the last mission. I saw you, then.”

Steve stops eating and sets his bowl down. “Do you remember when that was?”

“It’s not my job to remember.”

“Give it a guess.”

“All I know is,” Bucky says, in between mouthfuls, “you got away. Again. My handlers didn’t like that. I went under thinking they wouldn’t bring me back up. Got a few good licks in. Steve would’ve been proud.”

The wind dies down again and everything is quiet except for the fire and the sound of Bucky eating. 

“Who’s Steve?”

“The little guy from Br--” Bucky stops, his eyes wide and shocked, before he lets his bowl drop, the remnants spilling onto the table that he reaches over to grab a hold of Steve’s neck, metal fist raised. “What do you want from me?”

“I don’t,” Steve says, his breath coming quick. All his instincts scream to fight back, but instead he reaches up to touch the hand at his neck instead of pulling it away or breaking it. “I just want Bucky.”

The Winter Soldier bares his teeth. “Well, you’re shit out of luck, pal.” He sits back down, pulling his hand back out of Steve’s grip.

~

The day couldn’t be more beautiful. Sunny skies over Salinas, puffy, marshmallow clouds dotting the horizon, as perfect as if he drew it. She walks down the aisle in egg shell white, a long train following her. She’s crying and laughing, as if it’s the happiest she’s ever been. Who knows? Maybe it is.

Beside him, Peggie squeezes his hand. Right. The mission. Stay focused, Rogers.

Once the wedding ceremony is over they steal away back to the motel, into the bridal suite where the groom, a diplomat, a spy, and an American traitor, has hidden the information he’s stolen from the SSR. Smart move, disguising his defection back to England as a honeymoon that no one would ask questions about.

“This information is sensitive,” Peggy says as they strip the room down. “It could start a new World War.”

“Yeah, and the last one went so well.”

Steve glances at the photos stuffed into the groom’s duffle bag. There are four of him and his newly-wedded wife, holding hands, kissing, by all accounts in love. Even as the SSR kidnaps him and stuffs him into the back of a van, the last words Steve hears from him, before he punches him hard enough to knock him out, are for his wife. Even traitors have love, it seems.

Then again, he’ll be an American prisoner for the rest of his life. There won’t be love for him, anymore.

~

Bucky does a combination of push ups, sit ups, crunches and burpees for four hours. Steve gets tired just watching him, but - not really. He’s muscle down to his core, not an inch of fat on his carb-starved, stone-carved body. He sweats in the cozy heat of the room, the rush of it running down the curve of his back and the crevices of his abs, pooling on the floor only to evaporate into nothing. Steve can smell it and it’s intoxicating, the dirt-rich, sour-twisted stink of him, unshowered and unashamed. Steve wants to lick him clean. Bucky doesn’t stop even though Steve watches him - he doesn’t even seem to notice. Eventually, Steve turns away, ignoring how hard and heavy he is, how uncomfortable it feels to be in the same room as Bucky like this. All those years of wanting Bucky, and of wanting Bucky back, didn’t prepare him for this.

~

Steve has become a shell of himself. He feels brittle right down to his bones. He’s not a ghost, Peggy says. He’s a real man. He’s the one we’ve been losing to. They call him the Winter Soldier. _They_ , of course, being more elusive than ghosts; _they_ being whispers.

“Steve, are you all right?”

Steve shakes his head to come back to himself. Yeah, he’s all right. “So, not a ghost?”

“Quite the opposite. It appears as though he’s one of the super soldier off-shoots that emerged after the war. A lot of people tried to copy the formula that Dr Erskine created, and not many succeeded. This one, however, seems like a real threat.”

Steve pulls the files towards himself. They’re nothing more than grainy photos of a masked villain, but the arm is unmistakable. 

“We have word that he’s going after Zhang Chin.”

Steve furrows his eyebrows. “Professor Zhang Chin? Shouldn’t we just let him?”

Peggy gives him a look like she’s not sure whether he’s joking. Steve isn’t sure either. “We still need Chin’s research. He’s safer in our hands, you know that. Your mission, Captain, is to tail the Winter Soldier until he leads you to Chin, and then to take Chin alive.”

“And what about this guy?” Steve holds up one of the photos. He’s mostly-covered by a chimney; only the barrel of his rifle and wisps of his unkempt hair are visible. 

“If he comes at you, run.”

~

The fire dies out sometime in the night and Steve wakes up in the cot freezing. When he finally gets the fire going again, he sits in front of it for a while, trying to ignore Bucky’s looming presence watching him from the corner of the cabin.

“There’s a pack of cards next to you, if you wanna play.”

Bucky says nothing, so Steve says nothing more. He warms up quickly, but he sits there until the sun rises, just listening to the fire crackle and the wind howl. 

When he gets hungry, he cooks another meal, spicing things up with the vegetable dish this time. He leaves enough in the pan for Bucky, but it remains untouched. Bucky continues to sit and watch from the corner of the room, in position next to the bunker door.

“Are you going to tell me what’s down there, or is it a surprise?”

Bucky stands, shaking himself off from sitting in one position for so long, and kicks open the door. “Have at it.”

Steve pauses. “You’re not going to lock me down there and let me starve to death, are you?”

“It makes no difference to me whether you’re alive or dead.”

Steve feels a chill run down his spine. Bucky is, as ever, too powerful for measure. 

There’s not much in the bunker: MREs, more wood, flares with the stems ripped off, board games, more cooking materials, a mini library, some photo albums, soft clothes he changes into, a walkman and some cassettes, and a pile of blankets he brings back up with him. He could do some exercise to warm up, but he’s too self-conscious with Bucky watching him. 

When he emerges, Bucky’s sitting near the fire. He hasn’t even taken off his boots, but he’s put his suit vest back on. Steve almost prefers it that way. Seeing the scars etched into Bucky’s skin where shoulder meets metal is confronting, as staring in the mirror in the winter always was before Camp Lehigh and Erskine’s formula. Confronted by his own disability is one thing; it’s another to think of Bucky as easily weathered as he was. 

Steve holds up the walkman. “Do you like music, Soldier?”

He sits down next to Bucky - or, Bucky lets him sit down, and lets Steve put the headphones over his ears. Steve inserts a cassette, closes the lid, and punches the hold button. Bucky’s expression doesn’t change at first, but as the lilt of the music filters out - and, sitting this close, Steve can hear it, even over the wind - it softens, his eyes slip shut, and for a brief second Steve can see what he always saw in Bucky: an immutable being, as beautiful as the day is long, and vulnerable. 

Bucky’s hand twitches on his thigh and Steve brushes the urge to hold it away. He got so practised at pretending he didn’t want Bucky until Bucky left, and then he didn’t have to pretend any more, because Bucky was gone. It was a weight off his shoulders, not having to hide his feelings behind a wall, knowing they were always there, feeling them anyway. 

Now he’s back, and Steve has to spend the next three days pretending he doesn’t want him with every fibre of his being. Is it worth it? This is not the Bucky he knew. This Bucky is changed, scarred, and scary. Steve knows there’s some of his Bucky still in there, but how much exactly is anyone’s guess.

Bucky’s eyes open as the song ends. “I know this one. Sister Rosetta.”

Steve smiles in encouragement. “Yeah. You always liked her. We used to listen to her before church. It was like a ritual of yours. You liked it more than you ever liked the service.”

Something like recognition flashes in Bucky’s eyes before they shut down and his expression goes blank. “I don’t want to hurt you, Steve.”

“You don’t have to hurt anyone.”

“Yes, I do. You don’t understand.” Fear slicks its way into his voice until his whole body shakes with it. “What they’ll do to me - I do remember. It’s bad, it’s worse than anything. The pain--” His breaths come out short and shallow and in half a minute he’s gasping, his eyes wide with fear, pushing himself up and away from Steve, towards the door.

Steve gets there in time to throw himself at the door before Bucky can open it, but now Bucky has nowhere to go and he panics. Steve braces himself for a wave of destruction that never comes; he expects the walls to crumble under the force of the Winter Soldier’s hand, but it doesn’t happen.

What he gets is Bucky crouched down, backing himself into the same corner of the room, trying to brace himself physically against something that isn’t entirely physical. He’s crying, hyperventilating, taking in rattling lungfuls of stale air. 

He approaches cautiously, hands up, stepping back when Bucky swipes at him with a knife.

“Get the - _fuck_ away from - me.” It comes out like a splotch of paint squirted onto a canvas. 

Steve crouches down a couple feet away from him. “Hey, Bucky, listen to me.”

“Shut the fuck up.” Bucky tries to stand, but his legs give way and he drops back to the ground, landing hard. 

Steve lowers his voice. “Soldier. Report status.”

Bucky’s body goes still, though his breathing is still ragged. “Mission to be completed. Target acquired but not terminated.”

“Soldier, report physical status.”

“Body appears to be injured, showing signs of distress.”

Bucky’s breathing slows, but Steve stays crouching in case he needs to move quickly.

“Soldier, I’m going to run some tests. Stay still.”

Bucky does as he’s told and Steve moves close enough to grab Bucky’s wrist. “Heart rate 160. Sweating, pupils dilated, breathing erratic. Soldier, you’re having a panic attack. I’m going to need you to keep breathing for me. Long breaths, slow. Can you do that?”

It takes a few minutes but eventually Bucky’s panic subsides and his heart rate returns to normal, or whatever is normal for people like him and Steve.

“You’re making me remember,” Bucky says, pointedly, as though it’s all Steve’s fault. Maybe it is. Bucky stands, pulling his wrist out of Steve’s grip, and disappears into the bunker.

~

It’s a hot summer that year. Steve sweats through his shirts while sitting in the sun at the docks, watching Bucky score spare cigarettes from the dockworkers, watching him work for a few extra bucks when he can. Everyone’s struggling these days, but at least the sun is warm. He gets in some drawing practice, sketching the boats, the dock workers, and the sex workers who frequent the area when it grows dark enough.

Eventually, Bucky packs it in for the day and he and Steve walk back to the apartment at a leisurely stroll, the backs of their hands brushing occasionally, enjoying the stillness and heat of the night. 

“You see that gal in the green?” Steve’s making conversation just to make conversation, but it’s always been easy with Bucky, with whom he can talk about anything.

“Woman, Steve,” Bucky corrects, and Steve shoves him good-naturedly.

“Woman, right. Thought she might be sweet on you.”

Bucky laughs as if it’s ridiculous. “She’s way too good for me, Rogers. And you. A woman like that, you gotta be man enough for her. That ain’t us, pal.”

“I’m man enough,” Steve says, because no matter what he looks like he knows how he feels. He knows who he is.

“Yeah?” Bucky gives him a sidelong glance. “Maybe it’s just me, then.”

Steve doesn’t believe that Bucky could have doubts about that sort of thing. He’s seen the girls - women - Bucky dates, and they’re all as beautiful as him, if a man can be seen as beautiful. The couples he makes look like the people in paintings at MOMA. Bucky’s a _man_ ; Steve’s seen him in the nude enough times that the sight of him is sketched onto the backs of his eyelids as well as his sketchbook from where Bucky let Steve draw him. 

“Don’t worry, Buck,” Steve says, sticking his chest out. “I’m man enough for both of us.”

As if to prove him wrong, Bucky wraps his arms around Steve in a bear hug and lifts him off the ground. Steve hollers and shouts for Bucky to put him down, but he doesn’t mean it. It’s just what they do - the good-natured ribbing, the easy touches, the knowing glances that pass between them - it’s all part of what makes them Steve and Bucky. And that’s what makes them great. What’s the thing Bucky always says? That’s right, he’s with Steve ‘til the end of the line. And Steve’s not going anywhere.

~

Bucky doesn’t come back for the rest of the day. He must know Steve either wasn’t brave or stupid enough to go out in the storm, or he realises Steve won’t leave without him. They both have a lot riding on this mission, even if Bucky doesn’t remember what Steve’s side is.

It’s quiet and eery without Bucky in the room, and Steve doesn’t know what to do with himself. He’s so close to getting Bucky back, but he’s somehow pushed him even further away, across the split that severed their lives for decades, that erased their history and turned Bucky into a machine. Steve’s already made up his mind. He’s going to save Bucky, because he always will, and then he’s going to take down every sunnuvabitch who had a hand in Bucky’s fate, because he has to. He can’t live with himself otherwise. 

He’s formulating his plan while he works out, exercising his agility and stretching out his muscles, running it over and over in his mind when Bucky emerges from the bunker. He watches Steve for a minute, while Steve practices punching nothing, and then stalks over with the force of a tiger bearing down on her prey. Steve’s never been prey in his life, and he’s not about to start now.

The swipe Bucky takes at him is almost too fast for Steve to deflect, and as he does Bucky takes another, and another, lightning-fast, striking out efficiently with enough force that Steve has to try to really defend himself. It’s a dance that takes them from one side of the cabin to the other, Bucky striking and Steve parrying, until Steve gets the upper hand and it switches. Bucky’s not trying to hurt him; he’s not even trying to destabilise him. Maybe he’s bored, or maybe this is how he calms down from a panic attack, but one thing is for sure: he loves this. He’s so quick and agile, so forceful and intent, that Steve’s head spins from it. Bucky was always a brilliant soldier, but they turned him from stone into a weapon, and it’s not until Bucky gets a hand around Steve’s throat and another under his thigh and pile drives him into the floor that Steve realises just how precisely they carved him.

Steve goes limp, but Bucky keeps his hand there, the metal cool around his neck, flexing and retracting in increments. His other hand is clasped around Steve’s thigh and his knee is in Steve’s groin, and it’s the fastest Steve’s ever gone from flaccid to hard in his life, and he would be embarrassed if he cared. It’s Bucky. He’s never shied away from Bucky before, and every time Steve would get hard sketching him, or when they woke up in the mornings in the same bed and it just happened, because it happened whether he was around Bucky or not, Bucky would brush it off with a characteristic grin and say something dumb and cheesy like, “You’re so much better company when you’re asleep,” or, “Happens to the best of us, and apparently the worst,” and Steve would flick his ear or throw an eraser at him.

But now. Oh, his want is so clear and directed. His need points itself towards Bucky, the unknownable force, the shifting chaos of him, and it _hurts_.

“Bucky,” Steve says, a plea. What’s he pleading for? Relief? Release?

Bucky looks down at the same time he hitches Steve’s thigh up, and the pressure there builds.

“Fuck, if you’re not gonna - just don’t, okay? Seriously, I know you don’t want to, so just leave it.”

Bucky’s calculating stare bores into him, slicing at him like a sharpener does a pencil. “Who says I don’t want to?”

“Says me. You don’t know how to want things.” Steve tries to move, but Bucky’s hand squeezes just enough to let Steve know he’s not allowed to go anywhere.

“I want-”

Bucky looks up and his hands relax slightly. He gazes out of the window.

“I want more food.”

In a flash, Bucky is gone, leaving Steve to slump down on the floor, hard, aching, wanting.

~

The first time he and Peggy have sex isn’t his first time, but it is the only time that matters. There was some fumbled hand stuff with a couple boys at school, and once a girl let Steve fuck her in the back of the college supply shed because she’d just turned 21 and “hadn’t done it with nobody before”, but it’s not until Peggy that he really learns what sex is, and what his body can do.

They spend a weekend in Reno on a mission they finish in a day, most of just testing each other, exploring each other, fucking each other in the crudest and most lavish ways possible. Peggy likes it best on the wooden floor with Steve’s holding her down, and Steve discovers something he never thought he would like when her mouth is around him and three of her fingers are inside him. The weekend is over too soon, and when they return to the waking world they find no place for their relationship in it. Steve is shipped off to the Balkans, and Peggy to LA, and they don’t see each other for a year and a half. 

When Steve comes back, Peggy’s moved on, more focused on her work than anything else. She didn’t wait around for Steve to get his act together, and Steve doesn’t blame her, because it would be a long time coming.

~

They eat in terse silence, the Winter Soldier and Captain America.

~

Peggy doesn’t have a father to walk her down the aisle, so when she asks Steve he of course says yes. He imagines this is what it’s like to love someone more than himself, and have that someone still be alive at the end of the day. If only Bucky could see him now, doing the noble thing for love. He doesn’t even have a grave to laugh in. They couldn’t find a body to bury, even though they searched. There is nothing Steve can do now except, as hard as it is, move on.

~

The next night is just as cold, but Steve sleeps in front of the fire this time, with his mound of blankets. He’s too used to seeing the world to use them properly; that’s all he does, see the world for what it is.

Bucky joins him, eventually, even falls asleep for a few hours while Steve keeps watch, like the good old days. They’ve always fallen into stride together, first Bucky slowing down for Steve, then keeping pace with him. What they have, Steve knows, is more expansive and deeper than the Grand Canyon. No matter what Bucky remembers, they have it.

~

“You know where I’d like to go?” Bucky chews on a piece of gum, snapping it between his lips the same way Steve’s seen the girls at the dock do. The fire lights up his beautiful features in a ghoulish way, and Steve makes sure to capture that on the page, his pencil skittering as fast as he can to capture the sharpness of Bucky’s jawline and the way his tongue darts out to catch the gum.

“Surprise me.”

Bucky spits the gum into the fire. “Grand Canyon. Been all over the goddamn world with this friggin’ war, I just wanna go somewhere American I haven’t been. You’ll take me there one day, won’t you, Steve?”

“Yeah, Buck,” Steve says, the pencil curving on its own, ruling his hand the way Bucky rules his life (quietly, softly, exquisitely). 

Bucky’s eyes are wet. A droplet falls and catches in his stubble. Steve sketches that, too.

~

After breakfast, a few hours pass of tense silence broken only by the radio, and then the radio static, and then nothing when Bucky switches it off.

“The weather won’t let up for another few hours,” Bucky says, not sounding any one way or the other about it. He takes a seat on the floor near the door and pulls out his collection of knives. They’re all over his body, strewn throughout his suit. Steve watches him place one after the other on the floor in front of him, methodically, like a machine, and then get to sharpening them with a whetstone. 

He takes care to sharpen them. It’s hypnotic watching him work, his fingers sure and precise, his movements fluid. He has power in everything he does. 

“If you’re not going to kill me, why don’t you let me go?”

Bucky puts down the whetstone and angles a freshly-sharpened knife to see the edge of it. “I didn’t say I wasn’t going to kill you.”

“You don’t have to. You don’t have to do what they want you to.”

Bucky looks at him with that calcifying stare, Medusa in gunmetal-grey, and Steve is stricken.

“And what do you do, Steve? Do you obey? Do you fight? Have you known anything else?”

Steve looks away. It’s all he does these days - turn a blind eye to the things he’s seen and the way SHIELD runs because he has no better options. Does he fight? “Not lately. No, I don’t.”

A few seconds pass before Bucky speaks again, and this time it’s in a low voice, rumbling with threat and fear. “I ran, before. They caught me. Made me wish I hadn’t. I ran again, they caught me again. They always do. There’s nowhere I can go without them finding me. Everything I know they taught me. I’m nothing more than their puppet.”

Steve feels the words cleave his heart in two. 

“You’re more than what they did to you. You don’t have to own that.”

“We all own what’s done to us, and we can’t stop it.”

Steve swallows a lump in his throat. “But we can choose what we do to other people. You have a choice here.”

“My choice,” Bucky says, hand gripping his NR-40 in his human hand, “is to obey, or die.”

“What if I could give you another choice?”

Bucky’s up in a flash, pushing Steve to the ground, knife discarded and sent scattering across the floor. He doesn’t need it to bring Steve down. “Don’t. Don’t do that to me. Not you. If you let me down too, I’ll--”

Steve lets his legs fall open and Bucky slides between them. They both stink of sweat and dirt and the piss bucket no one emptied this morning, and it’s the least romantic way Steve can possibly think of to kiss Bucky for the first time, but the need - the need is back, and it’s overwhelming.

It happens slowly but inevitably, like a train moving on its tracks. Steve leans up to press his lips to Bucky’s, and when Bucky kisses back, that’s when Steve knows: this is what it’s like. Bucky eases himself down until their flush chest to chest, cradling Steve’s head with his metal hand, and it’s nothing like what Steve thought it would be with the Winter Soldier, and everything he thought it would be with Bucky. He pulls Steve’s thigh up again until it wraps around Bucky’s waist, only to bear down and grind like they’re horny teenagers in his mom’s basement. 

Within thirty seconds, Steve’s hard again, gasping into Bucky’s mouth when he feels Bucky grow hard, too.

“Off, off,” Steve says, pulling at Bucky’s suit until Bucky does as he’s told and extricates himself from it. Steve pulls at his own clothes, easier to get out of, and then they’re both naked and staring at each other for the first time in a long time. 

Bucky is covered in scars. It’s a stark reminder of how much they carved from him. Steve’s got a few of his own, but Bucky’s been through the worst of it and it shows. A minute passes in which they assess each other without touching, Steve on his back and Bucky on his hands and knees over him.

“Do you still want to…” Bucky looks like he doesn’t even know if he wants to, and all of Steve’s instincts scream to protect Bucky first, above everything else.

“Just - kiss me?”

Bucky does, and it’s soft but deep. Steve’s head fills with the thought of this, and only this. For as long as they kiss each other, the only place he exists is where Bucky touches him - his lips, his cheeks, his chin, the back of his head where Bucky tilts it with his hand, his earlobe, his eyebrow - he awakens at Bucky’s touch, a flower in bloom, a painting come to life.

They kiss, and kiss, and kiss. Steve could do this all day. He has never tired of Bucky, who was the one constant in his life until the war, and even then, after it. Steve will die with Bucky’s name on his lips, even if it’s at Bucky’s hand.

“I’m sorry, Bucky.” 

Bucky swallows the words before he sits back on his heels. “Yeah, well. Sorry ain’t worth shit, you know. But I forgive you.”

It’s cold without Bucky hovering above him, so Steve pulls one of the blankets over his lap. Bucky isn’t phased by the cold, it seems. A man borne of winter. A man born to endure.

“How?”

Bucky shrugs. “I just do. You didn’t know. I didn’t know. Are you sorry I didn’t come rescue you from your shitty life as a SHIELD officer?”

“That’s not the - jesus, Buck. All this time you were alive and I had no idea?” Steve feels the force of four decades of bottled up emotions ready to burst out of him. “You were being tortured and brainwashed and used as a fucking weapon to kill people in the name of HYDRA, and I had no idea? How can I ever forgive myself?”

Bucky’s expression grows dim. “You just do. You move on. You can’t change any of that.” He sits still long enough that he could be a photograph of himself, a portrait, but portraits are static, unchanging, uncaring of the lives lived by the people in them. They’re not the truth. This is, now.

Bucky, in front of him. Naked, afraid. Alone. That’s the truth.

But Steve can change that.

He holds his hand out, a gesture, a plea, and waits while his heart thumps hard in his chest for Bucky to take it, and when he does Steve knows what he’s been waiting for, why it didn’t work out with Peggy, why he’s been alone all these years and drifting, why he couldn’t come back to himself: because he lost Bucky. When he takes Steve’s hand, Steve knows what it is to love someone more than himself, more than what he fights for. He loves Bucky. It’s that simple. 

He leads Bucky closer to him, feeling the metal curl around his fingers, relishing the power in the movement, until he gets the hint and lies down beside him. 

“Is this okay?” Steve asks, as he places his arm across his body.

Bucky nods, his eyes wide and vulnerable. “Can we go back to - you know.” It sounds so much like him that Steve is hit by a wave of nostalgia. They could be back in their apartment in a storm, or under the Coney Island bridge, stupid teenagers without enough brains to learn anything more than each other. 

“Kissing? You can say it.”

Bucky huffs and trails his fingers along Steve’s arm, a delightful sensation that Steve closes his eyes against. “You were always the shy one when it came to stuff like this.”

“Yeah, you were always the bold one. Always trying to get me interested in dates or going out.”

“Sorry. Maybe I shoulda just let you be.”

“Nah. It showed that you cared. I was grateful, even if I didn’t show it.”

They’ve moved close enough to each other that Steve doesn’t have to move much to kiss him again. They grow bolder, touching each other more in the places that they don’t know. When Bucky places his hand on Steve’s chest Steve feels the weight lift, not from his shoulders but his heart.

~

It’s a cold night for summer, but Steve reckons it’s always a cold night in the desert. The moon is full, like a promise. It’s peaceful out here, nothing but the night and his thoughts. They’re still on Bucky, his mind and heart always on Bucky these days. He’s being sent on a mission soon, tracking the ghost again, but this is more important right now.

Peggy saved what she could of his drawings throughout the war, even if they weren’t very good, rushed and nothing more than sketches not knowing when the next attack would be. He takes one out of his top pocket now, careful not to smudge or tear the well-worn edges, not that Bucky would mind if he did. He holds it up to the moon, a promise fulfilled.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first Steve/Bucky fic I've written in four years. Hopefully my writing is better than the last time.


End file.
